Thursday, December 15, 2005

If I'm Gilbert, where's Sullivan?

It's easy to make Jackmormon laugh. See the comments for the title.

A remark about the verse: Mrs. R and I saw a production of The Mikado recently, and I've had the tit-willow meter in my head. I used pure amphibrachs (weak strong weak) with iambic closes to even lines (as Lewis Carroll did in "The Hunting of the Snark" and elsewhere). The 8th line however is irregular - "adjacent" is an amphibrach displaced by the leading "The", and "wall" is stressed against the meter - so hopefully the line comes across as almost all stressed syllables, the tone intended to be espressed being "I'm going to say this slowly and with a lot of emphasis so you catch my drift, ok?" Beyond that one tricksy bit the whole thing's in the setup.

Mrs. R just read Connie Willis's To Say Nothing About The Dog, and the Victorian era's apparently on my mind.

Labels: , ,

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Are aware of the ditty or whatever on the same subject by the more senior Wainwright the III?
===============================
(from "the BBC sessions")


I wish it was me doing it to you.
It sounds like it would be fun.
The walls in this hotel are thin.
I can hear you being done.

You sound like a nice intelligent girl,
From the way you gasp and moan.
Perhaps you went to Bennington.
Maybe your name is Joan.

(and so on)

17/12/05 18:44  
Blogger rilkefan said...

Probably there are versions of this theme in Latin, say in Martial.

18/12/05 15:42  
Blogger Marilee Scott said...

Yes, it is easy to make me laugh, but light verse will do it every time.

5/1/06 08:18  
Blogger Marilee Scott said...

Yes, it is easy to make me laugh, but light verse will do it every time.

5/1/06 08:19  

Post a Comment

<< Home